Here are some key points that we compiled from our read-through of Optimize:

Management

• Essentially, competition is anything that takes the attention of your prospects and customers away from your content. • Marketing-Centric objectives: 1. Elevate brand perception 2. Establish thought leadership 3. Drive customer engagement 4. Provide better customer service 5. Increase customer retention 6. Build a bigger referral network • Brandividuals – This is the concept of extended brand ambassadors. Make your marketing work for you! Brandividuals are those who represent your brand simultaneously with their own brand. These people have a lot of clout in the web sphere.

Content

• From awareness to advocacy, content plays an important role and, through an adaptive process of hypothesis, benchmarking, assessment, and refinement, businesses can create competitive advantages and value for their relationships with customers. • “On the web, the currency of influence is content.” • Read “Creating Valuable Content” by the Content Marketing Institute Site. • Create an editorial plan to outline content types, topics, and the keywords they’re optimized for. This will help narrow your focus on what content to create. • Create buyer personas – identify key customer attributes, collect data, analyze and create segments, create a profile for target audiences, identify keyword groups and content types for personas, incorporate with content creation/optimization/promotion. • “An understanding of how to meet customer needs through content as inspiration to buy will achieve the win for all.” • How to collect data for personas: demographics, insight/analytics, surveys, conversion data, listening/monitoring tools, blog engagement information from PostRank, aggregate user information (FlipTop). How well do your assets perform in ranking? • Content marketing – an approach to attract, engage, and inspire customers to a logical conclusion to buy and share through content that emphasizes the varied interests and behaviors during the buying cycle. • How can you effectively target your audience, as well as their extended network? Consider who has clout, and then determine what they want to hear (Feedback loop). • The content life cycle: Awareness à Consideration à Purchase à Customer Service à Brand Loyalty •Build your brand with content: Inventory your existing content à determine topics of interest à create content categories à assign content types à establish a timeline à chart a publishing schedule à incorporate other marketing plans à continue the process • “Every two days we now create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003.” • Follow the curation to creation path with content. Curation means sharing external content deemed interesting. Creation means building your content internally from scratch. • Curation tools: Flipboard, Scoop.it, Storify.com • News Aggregators: Alltop, Popurls, Techmeme • “With a content marketing plan, customer research leads to an identification of buyer interests and goals.” • Digital Asset Optimization: Images, videos, PDF and MS Office documents, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Google+.

Search

• Track your search results over time for a big picture. Run an SEO audit to determine your position in terms of search. 5 audits to run are: keyword research, content audit, technical SEO audit, link footprint, social SEO audit. • Keywords – focus on categorization, priority, and relevance to consumer buying cycle. What are your top “nonbranded keywords”? • Keyword metrics – popularity, global monthly search volume, competitiveness. Track with Wordtracker, Workstream, Keyword Discovery. • Filter keywords with a research tools like Google AdWords Keyword Tool or Keyword Discovery. • Build a Keyword glossary. Google Suggests provides insight into keyword variation. Google Insights for Search makes prioritization-based decisions based on what has happened and what is likely to happen. • Run a link audit using tools like MajesticSEO.com and Opensiteexplorer.org. Good links possess link authority, link relevance, and link trust. Reach out to local blogs – contribute to their blogs or have them guest write on your own. This helps build strong links. Check out BIGLIST. It’s a listing directory that Lee Odden’s firm runs. • Determine SEO Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s). The most basic high-level KPI is traffic generation by organic search. Some more KPI’s are keyword phrase position in search results, aggregate social shares such as Google+ votes per web page, inbound links from third-party websites to each web page, visitors from organic search (brand and non-branded phrases), visitors from links, and visitors from social media sites managed by the brand. • Don’t ever focus on just one large overall metric. This doesn’t provide context in which to create SEO strategy. • Some valuable SEO/Monitoring tools:

• Social media allows companies to be wherever their customers are. • Approach to social media – objectives, listening, audience, participation and content, measurement. •Discover social topics with tools: StumbleUpon, Technorati, Ads.youtube, Hashtags.org, Social Mention (shows the most popular social channels). • “Influence is a very valuable currency on the social web.” Consider your blog for Hub-and-Spoke publishing. • Be sure to garner the good graces of the following people: Social broadcasters (strongest), mass influencers (average), potential influencers (85% of total audience). •”Forrester’s Digital Marketing forecast for 2011 to 2016 predicts that social network investment will increase 300% over the next 5 years.” • Twitter analysis tools can analyze your network’s tendency to retweet and schedule for maximum exposure. Try Timefly or Buffer. • Use Followerwork.com and Klout.com to identify influencers; Muchrack.com for publishers. • Pages discovered in public social streams can also have influence on web page rankings. • Social Media Key Performance Indicators (KPIS): total number of connections with brand. social properties or individuals that represent the brand, amount of shares/comments/links/citations. • Social media focused content marketing: revenue, engagement, and cost saving. Revenue Goals: speed of sales cycle, percent of repeat business, percent of customer retention, transaction value, referrals, net new leads, cost per lead, conversion from the community Engagement Goals: members, posts or threads, comments, inbound links, tags/votes/bookmarks/shares, referrals, post frequency Cost Savings Goals: issue resolution time, account turnover, employee turnover, hiring and recruiting, percent of issues resolved online • “We buy from those we feel a stronger, more personal connection with.”